4 out of 5

Label: Skin Graft

Produced by: Todd Rittmann

I think it takes a pretty weird-ass band to A. shuffle through the underground’s cool kid’s checklist of outre labels like Skin Graft and Cuneiform; B. do this shuffling for nearly forty years as of this writing; C. to do this shuffling for 26 goddamned albums; and D. not drop a release that didn’t give a follower chills of “what the hell is this one going to sound like, and will I like it? and also secret power E. do all of this while somehow maintaining throughlines that lets you know it’s the same band.

Such is the weird-ass, many-personed, mutating beast of a band that is Cheer-Accident, forever guided by Thymme Jones, and just to answer that D. question, of “will you like” any given album? Well, Admission is the most extreme answer to that: at first, no. At first: how can this band drop something so trivial?

But then later you like it. And later the damn thing is stuck in your head, and you’re reading the lyrics and recognizing the flexible brilliance of C-A. Jesus.

Admission’s cover has the outline of a ticket – our entrance – around a porcelain figure of a woman or girl, improperly toting a child or doll, and surrounding her, outside of the ticket outlines, are several porcelain figures of clowns. This is all cast in a kind of gentle, glowing red tint, but the very fact that it is red also makes it rather alarming. I think there’s plenty to read into this image, or it’s just a nice shot, but let’s give it a one-word vibe: juxtapositions.

“Admission” is one of the band’s “pop” albums, but this is the absolute smoothest they’ve ever been. That’s what wholly disarmed me at first: the way this slots in to an almost adult contemporary version of the group’s most generalized sounds, nibbing from yacht rock and a kind of casual St. Vincent buzz, and the kind of crooner vibes you would’ve heard on VH1 in the 90s. Todd Rittmann’s production adds butter atop the already slick playing, caressing edges and warming guitars, softening drums. I mean, what the fuck, love songs and shit. It’s so… tepid.

During my second listen, though – this was while driving, not looking at song titles – I realized that the last tune’s chorus was not exactly matching its sing-song tone, from vocalist Bethany DeGaetano Smoker; rather, she pleads: “Die for me,” amidst other… hm, half-creepy phrases that can be taken uncreepily, I suppose, or as mightily manipulative. With that nugget of discordance, the album plays again, and I start hearing that kind of stuff throughout, giving me motivation to start browsing through the lyrics. (No longer driving, I promise.)

And I’m not the best analyst by any means, but, again: the actual nature of the words go quite against the surface buoyancy of the music, and are a worthwhile read besides: some of the most affecting, while poetic, stuff I’ve read in a lyric sheet in a while.

Then you start to hear it in the music: the dark turns and odd swerves rhythms will take; how things are closer to dirges at point than point melodies; the strange places distortion will hop in, or the beat pick up. Indeed: Cheer-Accident is all over this thing, not just in their “pop” way, but their weird-ass ways as well. It just presents as the most inoffensive thing ever, but the more you listen, the more prog and art-rock like Lovely Little Girls sneaks in there; the darker it becomes.

Woof. I keep poking at this band’s back catalogue while picking up their new stuff, and I’ve experienced this cycle of not for me / oh it’s totally for me, multiple times over, but it keeps getting me. Admission is the worst offender of that; the biggest swing. Which may make it one of my favorite C-A releases yet.